“President Obama got what he said he wanted when United States negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts this week in Geneva: direct engagement, without preconditions, with Iran.

But the trick now for Mr. Obama, administration officials concede, will be to avoid getting tripped up. In other words, is the Iranian government serious this time?”

The clearest risk is that the Iranians may play for time, as they have often been accused of doing in the past, making promises and encouraging more meetings, while waiting for political currents to change or the closed ranks among the Western allies to break.”

As the headline and article ask, is Iran playing for time? Everyone but the New York Times knows the answer to that. Will it work? We know the answer to that, too.

And the prospect of winning was too irresistible. After all, Mr. Obama has already envisioned the day when he could welcome the world to his hometown, never mind that small matter of reelection. “In 2016, I’ll be wrapping up my second term as president,” he told a rally in Chicago in June 2008. “So I can’t think of a better way than to be marching into Washington Park … as president of the United States and announcing to the world: Let the Games begin!”

. . . .

“They shouldn’t try to make politics of this,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a Chicagoan himself, told ABC News. “I think they should take some pride in the U.S.’s win, and you know, we’ll make sure they get some good seats once Chicago does host the games.”

These passages — demonstrating as they do the glaringly unfounded arrogance of Obama’s administration — have been conveniently removed from view.

And you know in your bones that, were it Bush who had gloated so, we would hear nothing else from Big Media for a week.

They’re still living in the world of a decade ago . . . when they could have gotten away with it.

There was a wild finish in the Georgia-LSU game, with #4 LSU scoring the winning touchdown with only 46 seconds on the clock. So far, there is only one upset in the top 25 with Michigan State beating #22 Michigan 26-20. The remaining top 25 include #3 Alabama over Kentucky, #6 Virginia Tech winning against Duke, #10 Cincinnati over Miami of Ohio, #13 Iowa with the win over Arkansas State, and #15 Penn State beat Illinois.

We’re just minutes away from two of the biggest games of the day: #7 USC vs #24 Cal and #8 OU vs #17 Miami.

Roman Polanski agreed to pay the victim in his child-sex case at least $500,000 as part of a civil settlement, but then failed to live up to the terms of the agreement, according to court filings reviewed Friday.

The documents leave open the question of whether the fugitive filmmaker has ever paid the money he promised in the confidential 1993 settlement with Samantha Geimer, but a change in her approach to Polanski in subsequent years suggests they may have resolved the issue.

I note this only because I have spoken with numerous people who didn’t even realize that there had been a civil suit. Frankly, I had always assumed the amount had been higher.

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